The Code Was a Means to an End

Code Platoon, week 15. Graduation is tomorrow, and I'm writing this during lunch after not logging on today. Yesterday I felt terrible. After a bunch of meds and sleeping pretty much all afternoon, all night, and again this morning, I'm finally feeling a lot better.

With almost everything behind me, I've been thinking about the biggest thing I learned this summer. It's going to feel like a crappy lesson to take away from a coding bootcamp, but it's the truth: I need the ability to write code by hand less than I thought I would.

Apparently, if there was a day to miss, this was it. All the final work is in. From what I heard, it was a pretty lax day anyway because there wasn't much left to do. I had to make a few tweaks to the group project, but they didn't take long.

So here I am, a day away from graduation, thinking about how we came full circle.

We started the cohort using AI. Then we dove into the code and stayed there for most of the program. Functions, commands, syntax. Fingers on keys. By the time we got to the group projects, we were back to using AI.

Meanwhile, the tools kept getting better. There were big jumps and smaller improvements all through the summer. I don't know how much of my takeaway comes from the curriculum and how much comes from happening to attend during these particular three and a half months. But I watched what I could do with these tools change while I was still in the program.

It kept convincing me that the skill we spent the majority of our time practicing, writing code on the fly, is becoming less necessary for the work I want to do.

I started learning to code on my own in 2021, before I had any AI help. Back then, it felt like everything depended on knowing what to type. What does this function do? What's the exact syntax? If I couldn't get that part right, I wasn't getting very far.

That feels very different now.

I'm not saying a professional developer doesn't need to know code. Of course you want to understand the syntax if you're working in a professional role. And I don't know how all of this plays out inside a huge enterprise. I suspect they're using these tools too, but that's not the world I'm speaking from.

I'm speaking from my level: a one-person business, trying to make things.

At that level, there's huge leverage in understanding what you can do with code and knowing what to ask AI to help you build. Even with something more complex like YoungMoney, our group project, I could see it. Certain things became possible on a timeline that would have been hard to imagine when I started learning. They weren't impossible back then. They just would have taken a long fucking time.

That's why this feels bittersweet.

I did learn the architecture in Code Platoon. I learned about the technology stack we used and how the pieces fit together. That knowledge helps me understand what I'm asking for. I can take that into whatever I build next.

But most of my time in the cohort went toward typing out code by hand. Was that helpful? Yes. Do I think it's necessary anymore to the degree we practiced it? For what I'm doing, I don't.

That's a strange thing to say at the end of a program I put this much time into. Hell, I still came in 2026. I knew AI existed. I wanted to learn this stuff anyway. And I did learn it. But the tools didn't hold still while I was learning.

I think that's something institutions like Code Platoon are going to have to grapple with. Maybe their role changes. Maybe they keep doing what they're doing and people keep coming. I have no idea what the future holds for a program like this. I just know that the relationship between learning to write code and being able to make software feels different to me than it did at the beginning of the summer.

More and more, I can get the benefits of software without personally writing every line or understanding every part of it at a deep level. From my side of the screen, that starts to feel like no-code software, even when there's plenty of code underneath.

I wanted to be able to make things. Code Platoon helped me understand more of what goes into them. AI keeps changing how much of that work I have to do with my own hands.

Turns out the code was a means to an end for the most part.